All tyhese points are well and good, but they are secondary to the main
reason netscape scraped.....

1) Charged For a free browser

At the time I was knee deep in supporting lots of end users, and to a one
they all saw this as a stupid move. When MS procalimed the browser was
once and forever free there was no doubt who would pull ahead in both the
browser wars and in the IMAGE war, that being the one that effects other
purchases.

Yes the browser was still Free, for educational and individual use and
some other small print that folks didint want to read, but right along
side the ever shrinking link to the free browser as the NOW ONLY 49.99
link. People reaction were obvious.

NS had the fatal conciet to think they were good enough to rise above a
prevailing market trend. When all the net was bubling up on free software
and perceptiopns of companys giving away the goods, NS put a price tag on
the party and no one wanted to see it.

This isnt perhaps the tech reason or the detialed biz reason, but this was
the clear and forever damning moment when NS faltered and let its enemys
pick up the ball.

RealAudio also has this problem, though they diversified early enough so
that it did not cripple them as bad as NS. IF real had kept the player
totaly free, no shrinking hard to find links to the free version aside the
49.99 link to thier "full product", and they put in a mp3 decoder earlier
the music sceen onthe net would be very differnt.

Oh yea, there servers licensing and strong arm tactics are also not
conducive to keeping customers wanting them. Real that is. The NS server
was a nice thing for a day, but id rather apache .